Network connected mobile devices and network applications are in wide use. Connecting an IT environment with mobile devices should involve the consideration of security-related issues. One example of a network application is a printing application that provides a print service and communicates with a printing device. A user might desire to use his/her mobile device to initiate the printing of a document at the printing device. However, problems may arise if the document contains sensitive or confidential information. For example, the user might accidently select the wrong printing device, which might far away from the user's current location. As another example, the user selects the printing device that is closest to the user, but, due to the distance between the user and the printing device, the user does not anticipate the delays that might occur from when the user initiates the printing of the document to when the printed document is available to retrieve at the printing device.
Additionally, when considering security-related issues, IT administrators presume that once target computing devices (such as printing devices) are deployed and operational, such devices are legitimate throughout their lifetime. As a result, when it comes to security-related issues, IT administrators tend focus their attention primarily on source devices that initiate interaction with the target computing devices and on any intermediary devices and services that may be “in the cloud.”
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.